The Marrow's Telling: Words in Motion - Eli Clare - annotations
2025-01-13 17:44 | Page No.: 18
The stones in the following pieces range from
the damage reeked by Chnstian missionaries to a
retelling of my birth, from child sexual abuse” to disability politics. They emerge from no one source but
many: intimate history, community knowledge,
activist thinking, letters of a long-ago white explorer
and the sweep of my imagination today, all intertwined, all somehow connected to the body.
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Allow your own
breath to be a single thread wending its way
through these pages.
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These lone words can be useful but never enough:
Eight-years-old, I carried my kite down to the hayfields and sheep pastures, flew it for hours on end,
spinning line out, five hundred feet, a thousand. I can
still feel that tug on my arm.
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beginning to dream 1994
written 1996
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naming myself 1997
wntten 1997-2007
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returning to my body 1996-2000
written 1998-2007
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if
I have one story I never
meant to tell, a patchwork
of medical records:
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With whom do we break the bone open? And once
broken, what does the telling take; how do we shift those
stones across language, culture, community? And once
translated, who listens and how?
2025-01-13 18:14 | Page No.: 89
To the Curious People Who Ask,
“What Do Your Tremors Feel Like?”
Tell me: have you ever watched
hands play a piano? Fingers
on the keys, ivory to skin, dance
white to black and back again, run
wild and loose, thump and caress
the universe cradled inside
a baby grand, those hands
I lost at birth. Breath squeezed
to empty gasps, I fell into the world,
brain of my fingers half dead.
Explain to me your hands resting
still as water before they dance.
That I cannot imagine.
after being asked yet again about my tremors 1990
wntten 1992
2025-01-13 18:26 | Page No.: 93
These days I practice gawking at the gawkers;
it’s an act of resistance.
2025-01-13 18:27 | Page No.: 95
They never get it night, but what I want to know is
this: will you? When I walk through the world, will
you simply scramble for the correct pronoun? Or
will you imagine a river at dusk, its skin smooth
and unbroken, sun no longer braided into sparkles?
Cliff divers hurl their bodies from fifty feet, neither
flying nor earth-bound, three somersaults and a
half turn, entering the water free-fall without a nipple. Will you get it right?
2025-01-13 18:28 | Page No.: 99
Interlude V: Demand
Certainly it’s necessary to tell it: 1 used to fly my
kite for hours on end. And still today I can feel its
tug, beckon of sky and wind. But by itself, story isn’t
enough.
We need to tell, talk, translate the marrow. Tell it as
trouble—all the years of whispers, snickers, earnest questions, “Do you know this is the women’s restroom?” Tell it
as joy—the first time your body felt alive and supple. Talk
it as postmodern theory, teasing those ideas out of the
bramble, or as a training for health-care providers.
Translate it as history, policy, fierceness, rebellion, civil
rights, a poem sung in the streets.
Let story be that kite, wild blue of sky, tug and
beckon, dialogue and demand.
written 2005-2007
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starting testosterone 2004
wntten 2004-2006
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looking at photographs by Abraham Menashe 1992
written 1992, 2007
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Father of mine, I have a myth I tell myself. Not
memory. Not fiction. Just clues tied one to the next as
I walk the North Shore, sit among skeletal birch,
watch gulls nestle between waves.
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memory becomes a gift, a trial, an open door
2025-01-13 18:38 | Page No.: 117
your escape waited one generation for me
dealing with ritual abuse 1992-2002
written 1996, 2007
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returning to my body 1996-2000
written 1998, 2007
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bodywork 1994-2002
written 1996
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finding community 1984-1990
written 1992